Marginal Musings from a New England Author

Poetry in medicine: Chapter and verse

Poetry (as well as good literature) is capable of stimulating the development of empathy in the reader—in this case, the clinician—and serves to enable him or her to approach the patient with an element of understanding and compassion. Such an approach undergirds the delivery of quality medical care.

In that piece I advocated for the inclusion of poetry in the medical curriculum to cultivate empathy on the part of clinicians toward their patients:

“It isn’t that clinicians are totally thoughtless people,” I opined. “In many instances they just never learned to appreciate what it might be like to stand in the patient’s shoes.”

On the heels of these words how heartened I was to peruse Dr. Pauline Chen’s recent New York Times column The Doctor as Poet, for here Dr. Chen expresses the same sentiment. more»